Google Analytics unblocks the Web w/ Async support

[alexandros]

http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-analytics-unblocks-the-web-w-async-support?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ajaxian+%28Ajaxian+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

[charlesmarshall]

googles actual post about it: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-analytics-laun...

[IgorPartola]

I think the NBGA API much nicer: http://925html.com/code/non-blocking-google-analytics-integr...

I usually use an adaptation of this, to take out the extra code that supports prototype and YUI (my choice is jQuery). This thing is super easy to use:

jQuery(document).ready(function() { ga().config({ id:'UA-xxxxxxx-x' }).track(); });

It queues up any track calls and pushes them onto GA as soon as it loads.

[enomar → IgorPartola]

That's fine if you only need _trackPageview. The Google solution provides more capabilities though. Also, be careful of using 3rd party solution. They don't always work correctly. The jQuery plugin for GA used to cache-bust every request to ga.js, which definitely slows down your page.

[xavi_]

They've also moved away from document.write. Now we can use google analytics on pages served as XHTML without resorting to these types of hacks: http://www.the-xavi.com/articles/operation-is-not-supported-...

[scotth]

I notice something like this in the snippet:

(function() { ... })();

What's that all about?

[functional-tree → scotth]

That executes the code in a local scope, so that any variables defined within that block don't leak outside of its namespace.

[scotth → functional-tree]

Thanks!

[tannerburson → scotth]

Define an anonymous function that takes no arguments, and execute it without assigning it to a variable. It's often used in javascript to keep things out of the global scope.

[scotth → tannerburson]

The first response was perfectly adequate. Let's keep threads clean. Read other responses before responding.

[rykov → scotth]

This works even cooler when you want to minify your code:

MyLongClassName = function() {};

function(_c) { _c.prototype.method1 = ...; _c.prototype.method2 = ...; }(MyLongClassName);

This allows something like YUI compressor to shorten _c local variable for every method definition, rather than store "MyLongClassName" for each one.

[jgrahamc]

This is a good move, but I think jsHub's approach of separating the page meta-data and the JavaScript that reads it is better.

http://jshub.org/blog/2009/10/17/universal_tag_or_universal_...

[andrewljohnson]

Jeez, finally...